Nowadays people have to make decisions more often than ever and they are faced with a growing choice, whether is it the choice of education, career or simple, everyday things like groceries. Because of that, it is not unusual that psychologists are getting more interested in psychology of decision making and processes that occur during the decision making. One of the most important constructs in psychology of decision making is maximization, which is often defined as the approach to decision making with a goal to choose the best possible option in a certain situation. It is closely connected with regret, defined as a more or less painful cognitive and emotional state of feeling sorry for losses, shortcomings, limitations or mistakes. Decision time is also one of important variables in this study. The main aim of the study was to examine the relationship among maximization, regret, desicion time and satisfaction with decisions about the most attractive destinations. The second aim was to examine the difference between condition with a bigger and condition with a smaller array of options. The last aim was to translate Maximization Scale and Regret Scale to Croatian language and examine their factor structure and psychometric characteristics. A hundred students from the University of Rijeka and the University of Zagreb participated in this study. Among them, there were 78 female and 22 male students. The age range was between 19 and 28 years. The study consisted of two parts. First, the participants completed the translated version of Maximization Scale and Regret Scale (Schwartz et al., 2002) and then they answered the 6 items about travelling and decision making which were constructed by the author of this paper. The second part was experimental and participants had to make decisions about the most attractive destinations for travelling among offered ones. There was an array of 30 options in the first condition and only 6 options in the second one.
Maximization is in a positive correlation with regret and in a negative correlation with satisfaction with the choice of destinations and satisfaction with decisions. It is also positively correlated with the most attractive destination's and the second most attractive destination's decision time, but only in case when participants had only 6 options. Participants who were in the condition with more options had longer decision time on average, but shorter average time per option.